Billy Evans Disputes Elizabeth Holmes’s Investor-Fraud Convictions

Billy Evans says he and Elizabeth Holmes expected her to win at trial. The verdict divided the allegations: Holmes was acquitted of charges that she defrauded patients with inaccurate test results, but convicted of defrauding three investors and conspiring with her former partner to do so. Evans disputes the investor convictions and focuses on the contrast between the two outcomes.

Evans says Theranos ran about 12.5 million tests on patients over 18 months. The government, he says, brought forward four patients to support allegations that Holmes knowingly gave them inaccurate results. A jury acquitted her on those patient-fraud counts. Evans argues that four cases do not demonstrate a problem across millions of tests, adding that diagnostic tests vary in accuracy: he says 90% accuracy is good for some tests, while 70% may be good for others.

The investor case was separate. Holmes was convicted of defrauding three investors and conspiring with her former partner. Evans says he and Holmes believe she was innocent of those charges, but he does not lay out their full argument at the event. Instead, he asks listeners to read material they planned to publish, saying they had spent years trying to understand what happened.

David Friedberg points to the public account shaped by Bad Blood and investigative reporting. Evans says Holmes’s silence during the legal proceedings allowed others to tell her story. The disagreement remains stark: he challenges the investor-fraud verdict, while describing a jury conviction and offering only a partial account of why he believes it was wrong.

One example Evans uses to explain how he sees the company’s business is its Walgreens rollout. He says Theranos had contractual obligations involving roughly 800 stores, at about $1 million per store. In his account, Walgreens stopped the rollout after critical reporting, and the company then missed revenue expectations tied to that arrangement. Evans presents the shortfall as arising from a contract that was not carried through, rather than from a fabricated number.

Friedberg also raises the claims that Holmes’s black turtlenecks and deep voice formed a performed persona associated with manipulation. Evans argues that some coverage applies a sexist double standard: a man who persuaded a major investor to commit a large sum in a short meeting might be praised for conviction and storytelling, he says, while Holmes was described as having fleeced that person. Asked whether she misrepresented what the technology could do, Evans does not give a general answer. He turns to the Walgreens example and to his broader view of Theranos as a company where hundreds of employees worked for years on a difficult problem.

Evans calls Holmes’s decision not to speak publicly during the legal process one of her biggest mistakes. “Her power was in her voice,” he says, and she did not use it while books, films, podcasts and news coverage shaped the public account of Theranos.

He is precise about the legal instruction. Evans says the judge did not technically impose a gag order. Rather, in pretrial proceedings, the judge told the trial team that the case should be litigated in court, not in the press. Holmes, whom Evans describes as someone who follows rules “maniacally,” took that direction seriously and remained silent.

In Evans’s account, that choice reflected both caution and idealism. He says Holmes grew up with parents who worked in government and emphasized public service. Family conversations, he recalls, centered on what pain and suffering someone had alleviated that day. He says Holmes believed in her innocence and had been told before the indictment that she and the company had done nothing wrong.

Friedberg asks why Holmes did not put forward a different account if she and Evans believed she would win. Evans agrees that staying silent was a mistake; he describes the public silence, rather than the trial strategy itself, as the missed opportunity. His explanation is that Holmes believed she should follow the judge’s direction and keep the dispute in court.

Evans says You Can See Everything was meant to let viewers see Holmes as a person and make up their own minds, not to relitigate the Theranos case. At the time the project took shape, he says, Holmes faced an 11-year sentence and had not been speaking publicly about the case. The documentary therefore focused on their personal lives.

The purpose grew out of Evans’s experience introducing Holmes to people close to him. His grandmother and friends initially questioned his relationship with her and asked whether he knew who she was. He would ask them to meet her, he says. After spending time with her in ordinary settings—going for a hike or helping a friend—their views shifted. Evans wanted the film to give a wider audience the chance to spend time with her in a similar way.

He had not seen the documentary at the time of the interview, so he could not say whether it achieved that aim. Friedberg says the trailer’s ominous music and imagery could reinforce the existing view of Holmes as manipulative. Evans agrees that the trailer looks intense, but says the finished edit was outside his control. He recalls filming with Nathan Fielder and Lance before Holmes reported to prison.

The timing is described differently at different points. The introduction presents the documentary as forthcoming; later, Evans says it is out. He also says the project was initially expected to wrap within a year of shooting but took about three years. At the time he spoke, he still had not watched it and said he might decide it was “the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” Its intended purpose is clear in his account; his view of the finished film was not yet formed.

Evans says he met Holmes at a Fleet Week party in San Francisco on October 7, 2017, before her indictment but after critical reporting had begun. He remembers talking for two or three hours. He did not recognize her at first; what struck him was how closely she listened and how curious she was about small details. They realized their offices were two doors apart, and she gave him a business card with her personal number written on it.

Learning who she was forced Evans to reconcile the person he had met with the public figure he had been told to distrust. They were friends for about six months before the relationship became romantic. Three weeks after that, he says, Holmes was indicted. He was 26 or 27 and unfamiliar with the legal process.

Evans describes Holmes as “cool as a cucumber” during the unfolding crisis, while saying she believed she was innocent and had been told the company had done nothing wrong. As the case developed, he says, they were repeatedly surprised by events they had not expected.

The period before trial was long. Evans recalls Holmes working late with lawyers, reviewing hundreds of thousands of records and trying to piece together the story being told about her. He says they also spent eight months traveling in an off-road RV with their husky, Balto. They hiked during the day and worked at night, partly to escape the attention they faced in San Francisco. At restaurants, Evans recalls, people would take out their phones soon after the couple arrived; even a friend’s celebration could become coverage of Holmes’s presence.

Their son was born on July 10, 2021, shortly before the trial began. Evans says the pregnancy was not planned. Their son was three months old when the trial started. Evans describes waking at 4:30 each morning with Holmes, helping her get ready, and assisting with her hair after watching tutorials. Holmes pumped milk during court breaks; Evans collected it at lunch and sent it home by Uber for family members to feed the baby. He says the jury did not know she was caring for an infant, and recalls the first two months of the trial—when she spent much of the day apart from her son—as crushing.

At the time of the interview, Evans says Holmes had been at the Bryan Federal Prison Camp for 485 days. He rejects the idea that the camp is easy simply because it is less restrictive than other facilities: the separation, he says, has been painful every day. Their son was 22 months old when Holmes went to prison. At first, Evans told him that his mother was at work; the family’s rule now is to tell the children the truth when they ask questions, however difficult the conversation.

The children were not present when Holmes reported to prison because Evans thought the goodbye would be too emotional. He recalls driving her to the facility and hugging her before she went in. She told him, “Now we are free.”

A prison call arrives during the interview. Evans says he cannot put Holmes on speaker without risking punishment, and briefly tells her he is onstage and loves her. He says he cannot call her back. The exchange makes the limits on their contact immediate: even a short conversation has to stay within the prison’s rules.

Evans says he is raising the children while building a business and trying to bring his wife home. He describes a new respect for parents raising children alone and says it is difficult knowing that the children spend more time with him than with the person he considers his best friend and soulmate.

He describes the expected path out of prison as time in the facility, possible time in a halfway house, and possible home confinement. Under the First Step Act, he says, Holmes can earn 16 days off her sentence for every 30 days she participates in programming intended to reduce the likelihood of reoffending. At the time of the interview, he expected she could reach a halfway house in the second quarter of the following year.

Restitution also affects daily life. Evans says Holmes owes $435 million and that 70% of money sent to her for commissary is deducted. He disputes how the loss amount was assembled, saying it included investors who were not proven to have been defrauded. He says Holmes recently received a one-year sentence reduction after changes to sentencing guidelines, and that the government had argued there was no evidence the investors who lost money suffered financial hardship.

Holmes can still buy food, Evans says. Friedberg recalls spending an afternoon with her buying trail mix from a vending machine; Evans jokes that she eats nuts like a squirrel. He also says the facility holds about 800 women and that perhaps 30 receive visitors on a given weekend. Watching children cry as they say goodbye to their mothers is among the hardest parts of visiting.

Evans says his background is in photonics. He worked at Luminar, which built lidar for autonomous vehicles using lasers, before founding Hamantus. He describes the company’s work as building a new layer of sensors to better understand biology, motivated in part by his view that diagnostics are too expensive and insufficiently accessible.

The technique is Raman spectroscopy: light passes through a biological sample and scatters, changing color in a way that can be interpreted to identify chemical structures. Evans says researchers already use the technique, but existing devices cost millions of dollars, are many feet long and are complicated to use. His aim is to make the sensors cheaper and more widely distributed.

Hamantus wants to produce rich biological datasets for artificial intelligence to use in finding correlations among signals, Evans says. In his description, many existing tools are designed to produce results human doctors can interpret; the company is trying to create deeper datasets for AI analysis.

Friedberg asks about reports calling the company “Theranos 2.0.” Evans says Holmes’s connection to the project makes that framing easy, but describes Hamantus as a photonics company developing Raman spectroscopy devices. “It’s a lot easier to make it seem like Elizabeth Holmes is El Chapo running, you know, a diagnostics cartel from prison,” he says, “than it is to say Billy’s building a nerdy company.”